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The Overnight
by Ramsey Campbell
(PS Publishing, £35 hardback or £60 slipcased hardback,
414 pages, signed, numbered, limited edition, published May 2004.)
Review by David Mathew
 Not
since reading Ramsey Campbell's novel The Hungry Moon have I
found a written description of the dark more unnerving than that which
is found on pages 300-301 of The Overnight. We'll allude to this
novel's eerie evocations of preternatural evil in due course, but for
the moment let's follow one of the many (in fact, an uncharacteristically
large number, for this author) principle characters -- there being but
a small number of minor characters throughout -- as he descends a flight
of stairs at his workplace, the power in the building have been disabled:
'He doesn't like wobbling on one leg while he gropes for the stair
with the other foot. It must be the blind dark that makes him seem
to have to stretch farther than he ought to need. He plants his heel
as far back on the tread as there's space for, and slides his sweaty
prickling hand down the banister, and lifts his other foot to hover
above the oppressive depthless dark. It's just the night, he tries
to tell himself ... He wishes he could think how many steps lead to
the delivery lobby, surely less than a couple of dozen. Since he's
performing the identical action each time he clings to the banister
and lets a foot sink into the blackness until it meets a stair, why
isn't the process growing easier instead of seeming ever more dangerous?
Perhaps that's because he didn't count the steps he has already taken,
thus losing all sense of how far he has yet to descend ... The edges
of stairs scrape the backs of his ankles, and whenever a foot settles
on a tread he feels as though he's leaning out too far over the blackness.
He takes another wavering pace downwards that only the banister renders
slightly less perilous -- and then his fist closes on emptiness.'
Although this is a lightly bowdlerized version of the paragraphs which
actually appear in The Overnight -- and even then it is emburdened
by the weight of being taken out of context -- I would hope that it
gives a scintilla of what one might realistically expect from this exemplary
piece of fiction. Campbell's fine writing is, of course, a given; but
his career-long skill of making ordinary events (unpleasant, perhaps,
in this case, but ordinary: a walk down the steps in the dark) into
a moment- or sometimes even life-changing event, is worth more than
an idle thought. Regardless of the fact that by this point in the novel
(approximately three-quarters through), the characters should have,
but in the main don't have, any notion of the wider field of horrors
that has been rooted nearby, the characters -- I should call them employees
-- blunder on, with their arguments, relationships and fears that are
not concerned with their predators. The character descending the flight
of stairs is but one case in point. A different character experiences
the terror of losing the ability to read (and here, in context, we do
approach the supernatural); relationships are twanged like double bass
strings, and not only those resulting from previous emotional affairs:
the arrival of a new and ghastly American manager, Woody -- the jokey
name, perhaps, an intentional counterpoint to his willing avidity in
the workplace; and his insistence on the staff smiling at all
times a factor that certainly puts the teeth of many on edge, not least
those of the reader -- is enough to set off in its crusade what has
waited for a long time to be seen.
Typically for Campbell, we're in the north of England: a business
park going by the moniker of Fenny Meadows, and in particular a bookshop
called Texts. The structure of this book, I might say, is circular (by
which I do not mean spiral) but this is not quite right. Imagine a dartboard.
While there might not be quite as many principle leads in The Overnight
as constitute the numbers around and outside the doubles on the board,
the novel has many protagonists. All of them (in third person but present
tense) are offered a way of describing -- decoding, translating -- a
myriad of events to which only the reader holds the master key. For
this reason The Overnight is a novel of dramatic irony -- a perfect
example of the same, I would contest -- every bit as much as it is a
novel of Supernatural Horror. But the segments on a dartboard are fat
arrows, all aiming in one direction: the bullseye. And the bullseye
is the night on which the staff are shanghaied into working until the
early morning, the better to prepare for some important business visitors
from the States and for the hoped-for surge in Christmas purchasers.
So what's the problem? Aside from anything mentioned hitherto, of
course, what's the problem?
The fog. The fog's the problem, and in many more ways than one. The
worries that the fog might deter potential customers become secondary
to the very real threat of what the fog might contain: long before
what the fog envelopes shows (or doesn't show) its fact, there are clues
which the staff, variously, either ignore or dwell upon; but the nexus
of grave activity, my adjective here having been chosen carefully, is
the Overnight.
Suggestion is a powerful force in The Overnight. That many
of the rotating crew of sometimes self-unreliable narrators face their
demons alone is important in its indication of a broken-down work ethic,
human system, and an unglued camaraderie. But it is the element of suggestion
at which Campbell exceeds. To wit:
'His shadow smears itself across the whitish door like another example
of vandalism as he reaches for the metal handle. Whoever's in the
cabin must be asleep to have allowed the radio to drift so far off
the station. The misshapen voice sounds as though it's trying to force
its words, if there is more than one, through mud ... To the right
of the sink an open door reveals a toilet with an upright lid, which
the dimness turns into an oval mask so primitive it's featureless.
Two swivel chairs, one behind the other, face the entrance, but of
course they didn't swing to greet his knock, nor did their occupants
jump out of them to hide. If that's absurd, is the situation any less
so? The cabin is deserted, and he can't see a radio.'
Long-term readers of Ramsey Campbell know, however, that there are
sharper knives in his arsenal. The Overnight is certainly not
for those (are there any anymore?) who live for gore, but the author
does not shy away in this novel, or in others (an earlier image of a
loving couple with their lips glued together springs to mind), from
the inevitable spinekick. (Here I will expunge the relevant character's
name, for the preservation of tension in the hopeful event that you
read this book.)
'He struggles to believe he's mistaken, but the sight is just too
clear to be illusory. There's no hollow around (the) head. His face
is buried so deep in the soil that it covers his ears ... In desperation
(he) thrusts his fingertips into the mud, squeezing it under his nails,
and locates ... cheekbones. When he tugs at them (the) head wobbles
up on its stiffening neck as the ground that was moulded to his face
emits a slobbery gasp ... '
The Overnight is a mighty novel; a masterpiece, even. I loved
it, and what's more the ending came as a genuine surprise.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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